The great age of the megalomaniac director, who dreamt of making big, visionary, no-expenses-spared movies, ended with the silents. D.W. Griffith and "Intolerance" (the set for Babylon!), Eric Von Stroheim and "Greed" (the 9 1/2-hour first cut!), Fritz Lang and "Metropolis" (the Tower of Babel!), Abel Gance and "Napoleon" (the title says it all). The studios tired of backing geniuses who wasted millions, while the sound era required new talents, who were better with intimate glamour shots and witty repartee than crowd scenes. Only Lang, whose first talkie, "M," became an international hit, had a real career after 1928. (He also later disowned "Metropolis," which he told interviewer Peter Bogdanovich was a "patchwork" that he "detested after it was finished.")
Today, with digital technology, it is possible to create big, visionary movies without breaking budgets -- even those of the Japanese film industry. The result has been a spate of Japanese films, both animated and live-action, that take up where Lang and company left off in the delusions-of-grandeur department.
Mamoru Oshii's "Innocence," Katsuhiro Otomo's "Steam Boy" and Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" are hardly likely to trash their makers' careers -- quite the opposite. All three auteurs have large fan bases who not only tolerate their excesses, but delight in them. Even Oshii's "Innocence" -- an essay on human identity that is to most animation what Kant is to "Chicken Soup for the Soul" -- is doing decent business.
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